Many people think they know what the real story of the movie Noah should be.

The same people probably think they know what the real story of the man Noah is.

Darren Aronofsky, the director of the new movie about Noah and the great flood, is ready to rain on what he views as their misinformed parade.

“Noah has been turned into a nursery-school story,” said the director and co-writer of Noah, opening on Friday in theaters nationwide.

“And it’s not a nursery-school story in the Bible. It’s the end of the world.”

Rarely has a movie generated as many polarizing opinions before its release as Noah has .

The $130 million drama stars Russell Crowe as the man who builds a giant ark while God wipes sinful humanity from the planet. Jennifer Connelly plays his wife, Naameh; and Anthony Hopkins, his grandfather Methuselah.

The movie has become the target of a fatwa — or decree — from a leading Egyptian Sunni Muslim institution because Noah is mentioned in the Quran and, as such, isn’t to be artistically depicted. Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have banned the film, with other Middle Eastern countries expected to follow suit.

Closer to home, Noah has been attacked by the Christian right for its creative license.

Paramount Pictures, which co-financed Noah with New Regency and is distributing the film, said much of the censure has come from people who haven’t seen the film and were responding to secondhand accounts of an outdated screenplay.

One conservative Christian organization, the National Religious Broadcasters, threatened to boycott the film unless Paramount put out a marketing disclaimer. Without telling Aronofsky, the studio modified advertising materials by saying the movie is “inspired by” the story of Noah rather than being a literal interpretation of Scripture.

At the center of the storm stands Aronofsky, whose strongly personal films include Black Swan and The Wrestler and who has battled other studios and executives through the years.

The 45-year-old filmmaker has been thinking a lot about Noah since he wrote a prizewinning poem about the biblical story — called The Dove — when he was 13.

He and screenwriter Ari Handel have been working on the Noah script for a decade, burying themselves in research and consulting with an array of Jewish and Christian theologians.

The two-hour, 17-minute film is one of the most overtly spiritual movies any big Hollywood studio has made in years (both the current Son of God and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in 2004 were independently produced).

One of the first lines of dialogue: “The Creator made Adam in his image, then placed the world in his care.”

Even though Crowe has the lead role, the real star is the concept of original sin.

Debate about the film will probably focus on how the filmmaker has expanded the Noah story into a full-length movie.

As Aronofsky pointed out, the Genesis tale of Noah, for all of its enduring power, is fleeting in the Bible; and Noah doesn’t speak until a dove returns with an olive branch. Such details don’t make for much of a movie.

“When you really look at the story in the Bible, there’s very, very little information,” Aronofsky said. “It’s four chapters long. No one speaks until the end. And the Noah character doesn’t really have an arc — with a ‘c.’

“But the more you read it, the more interesting clues there are. There are many, many hints at things.”

Working in what he calls “the tradition of Jewish Midrash” (stories based on the Bible by scholars) — in which he and Handel tried to fill gaps in the biblical narrative — Aronofsky created a story that tries to explicate Noah’s relationship with God and God’s relationship with the world as it has become.

The film follows Scripture closely: The ark is dimensionally accurate, cubit by cubit. Close watchers of Noah will notice seven of the “clean” animals (as the Bible has it) entering the ship along with the pairs of other species; and Noah does end up drunk and naked, as he does in the Old Testament.

The handful of religious critics who have previewed the film have singled out several of the film’s creations for particular condemnation.

Jerry Johnson, president of the National Religious Broadcasters, said he was put off by a Noah montage suggesting that evolution and creationism are not mutually exclusive and that Noah wasn’t “righteous” enough.

Like other early naysayers, Johnson was also bothered by the film’s suggestion that stewardship of the Earth — Noah and his family are vegetarians, and the antediluvian planet (the film was shot partly in barren Icelandic landscapes) has been ravaged by misuse — is somehow inconsistent with the Bible and thus “phony.”

Aronofsky, who was raised Jewish and identifies himself as an atheist, aims to follow a course that makes his telling both relevant and timeless; in one rapid-fire sequence about violence, some modern weapons are glimpsed in the blink of an eye.

As for the environmental themes, he said, he was motivated to relate in Noah what had happened to the world so quickly after the Garden of Eden.

Noah’s vegetarianism, Aronofsky said, is backed by a mandate in Genesis when God declares, “I have given every green plant for food.”

“To go all the way from the beauty of creation to the grieving of God’s heart in 10 generations made us think there is a lot of story there,” the director said.

“The pain that the Creator must have felt to be contemplating destroying his creation — we wanted to personify that. So we tried to connect that story to Noah’s, and we made Noah a personified, humanized version of God’s journey.

“And God’s journey in the story is from a God who wants justice to a God who grants mercy.”